List equivalency among five Tennessee Tonality Test lists: A preliminary investigation

Abstract

The Tennessee Tonality Test (TTT) is a speech discrimination test which has frequency selectivity in the test words rather than the commonly used phonetical balance of the test words. It was assumed that frequency selectivity in the test words could be achieved by dividing them into the low, mid, and high categories based on the pitch of the words which was termed “tonality.” The TTT was administered to seven normal hearing (23 to 32 years old) and seven hearing-impaired adults (20 to 70 years old). The subject was asked to repeat each prerecorded word which was presented at the subject's MCL and the tester wrote down the response. The criterion measure was the percentage correct of the test words correctly repeated among the total of 30 words in each list. The results indicated that there were no significant differences among the mean tonality scores of the five different lists for normal hearing and for hearing impaired adults. The need for future studies will be discussed. [Work supported by NIHR.]